Chairman Mao's Red Braised Pork

First, some recent fooding:


Sashimi at Izakaya Fujiyama, Surry Hills. The real highlight though was the much less photogenic braised pork belly with eggplant - soooo gooood. The chocolate cake with condensed milk icecream and quince was also a winner.


Cherry trifle at The Carrington, Surry Hills, which has re-furbed itself as a hipster Spanish tapas joint. The cocktails are awesome - I liked the Spanish Pimp and the Single Mother, and doesn't that sound like a movie title? - and there's a lot of fun food to try like empanadas, medianoche (Cuban midnight sandwich), chicken wings, calamari sliders, jamon croquettes and churros with chocolate.


Secondly, another recipe from Fuschia Dunlop. Apparently this was one of Mao Zedong's favourite dishes. For my own part, I found this dish lacking a certain something - I think the pork needed longer cooking time to get it really soft - but the flavour is quite delicious.



Chairman Mao's Red Braised Pork

500g pork belly (skin optional)
2 tbsp groundnut oil
2 tbsp white sugar
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
20g fresh ginger, skin left on and sliced
1 star anise
2 dried red chillies (I subbed in some dried chilli flakes)
A small piece of cassia bark or cinnamon stick
Light soy sauce, salt and sugar
A few lengths spring onion greens

Plunge the pork belly into a pan of boiling water and simmer for 3-4 minutes until partially cooked. Remove and when cool enough to handle, cut into bite sized pieces.

Heat the sugar and oil in a wok or pan over a gentle flame until the sugar melts, then raise the heat and sit until the sugar turns a rich caramel brown. Add the pork and the wine.

Add enough water to just cover the pork, and add the ginger, star anise, chillies and cassia/cinnamon. Bring to the boil then turn down the heat and simmer - the book suggests simmering for 40-50 minutes but I had to take it longer and on next attempt will probably try for twice as long.

Towards the end of the cooking time, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce and season with soy, salt and sugar to taste. Add the spring onion greens just before serving.

Adapted from "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: recipes from Hunan province" by Fuschia Dunlop

Steamed mince pork with eggs

This recipe is adapted from Fuschia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: recipes from Hunan province. Dunlop is a British food writer who's made her name by collecting and translating recipes from China, particularly Sichuan province, acting as a kind of cultural ambassador.

She's also the author of a really entertaining, funny memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, which follows her experiences as a exchange student in Chengdu, her impromptu enrolment in a local cooking school, and her subsequent adventures.

I saw her speaking once at the Sydney Food Festival in 2009, where she presented with and translated on behalf of husband-and-wife chefs Yu Bo and Dai Shuang of the unassumingly named but culinarily ambitious Yu's Family Kitchen in Chengdu, Sichuan. Some dishes in their demonstration:


16 dishes by Yu Bo and Dai Shuang, each illustrating a different flavour and technique.


Dai Shuang's hedgehogs. Tiny dough hedgies filled with red bean paste; their eyes are black sesame seeds. Each is hand made, with the 137 spikes of each hedgie individually snipped with a pair of embroidery scissors (and yes, she counted each spike in her demonstration!).


Yu Bo's playful 'calligraphy' set. The brush tips are pastry with a soft filling and the red wax is tomato paste. Dip the brush and eat!


And now to a much much humbler offering:



Steamed minced pork with eggs

4 medium or 10-12 small dried shittake mushrooms
A small piece of fresh ginger, unpeeled
300g minced pork
1 tsp sesame oil
200-250 ml or less of chicken stock
3 or 4 eggs
Salt and pepper
2 spring onions finely sliced

Soak the mushrooms in boiling water, leave for 30 minutes. Crush ginger with flat of a cleaver and place in a cup with a little cold water to cover.

Place the pork in a mixing bowl. Drain and finely chop the shittake (retaining mushroom water) and add to the pork. Add 3 tablespoons of the ginger soaking water, some of the ginger finely chopped, sesame oil, salt and pepper. Mix well.

Stir in the stock and mushroom water, a little at a time to allow meat to absorb, until you have a loose paste.

Pour the pork paste into a shallow bowl. Break the eggs over the pork (I did these whole, as suggested by Dunlop, but on consideration I would suggest beating them first). Place the bowl in a steamer and steam over high heat for 15 minutes until pork is cooked through.

Serve with scattering of spring onions.

Adapted from "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: recipes from Hunan province" by Fuschia Dunlop

With Nails by Richard E. Grant (TBR Challenge Book #8)

I think the first time I ever saw Grant on screen was during high school history class, in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1998). For a long time afterwards, my classmates would quote to one another:

"They seek him here, they seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere!
Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel!"

Anyway. Since then I've seen Grant many more times, on screen and off, including a live taping of ABC's First Tuesday Book Club; and presenting an anniversary screening of British cult classic Withnail & I (1987).

It's that movie, as the title of the book suggests, which kick-started Grant's tv and movie career. His role as the alcoholic, somewhat deranged and self-deluded 'resting' (unemployed) actor Withnail became his calling card to Hollywood.

This memoir spans more than half a decade in Hollywood. He describes his experiences taking good roles in bad movies (Warlock, Henry and June, LA Story), culminating in Hudson Hawk (1991), now infamous as one of the biggest, most hubristic and expensive flops of all time. For his part, Grant received a Razzie nomination! However, immediately after that trial by fire, the slate was balanced when he found himself working with three great auteurs: Altman, Coppola and Scorsese.

For Grant's eloquence and sense of humour alone, this book would be worth a read. As a movie fan however it's possibly even better - it's rare to see the workings behind the scenes of Hollywood from an actor's perspective described so frankly and honestly. He's not in the least shy about making his feelings heard about Bruce Willis (charming egomaniac), Joel Silver (pure egomaniac) or Madonna (narcissist) - it doesn't seem to have hurt his career either, with Madonna for one choosing to work with him again, on her directorial debut Filth & Wisdom (2008).

And he has good things to say too about movie sets that do work well, too, and about the different working methods of each director. Altman for instance keeps his sets easygoing and charming, inviting collaboration. Coppola is controlled chaos with a family emphasis; and Scorsese is focused and detail-oriented. He also offers tantalising glimpses of movies that could have been - Withnail was initially offered to Daniel Day-Lewis, for instance, while Grant himself was offered the Sheriff role in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves which eventually went to Alan Rickman in a movie-stealing role.

There are times when Grant's stories of Hollywood high life seem like a series of strategic namedrops – lunch with Steve Martin, dinner with Gary Oldman, not to mention hang-outs with Anthony Hopkins, Uma, Winona, Johnny, Madonna, Tom Waits, Hugh and Liz – but he's always undercutting that with his own sense of self-deprecation (convinced he'll be found out as a fraud, insecure as all actors are!) and his sharp observations on the excesses of Hollywood life - his descriptions of Sharon Stone's manipulations of shop assistants and Bruce Willis' ego on set are all priceless.

My 12 books for the 2011 TBR Challenge